The already expensive battle to acquire engineers with knowledge and experience in the field of self-driving cars just cost Uber another estimated $245 million, not including the money they spent defending their legal battle against Waymo for a year before the parties agreed on a settlement.

As engineers get closer to developing the technology necessary to produce viable self-driving automobiles, it’s becoming increasingly clear that, not only is self-driving technology the future, it is going to be a very lucrative future. It has driven up the costs of engineers in the field to unprecedented heights, but Uber may have topped them all by spending $590 million to buy an entire self-driving truck company from Anthony Levandowski, a former Google engineer. The terms of the agreement were for Levandowski to receive an additional $250 million in Uber stock if Otto reached certain performance goals, but before that could happen, Levandowski was fired from Uber for refusing to cooperate in the investigation into the alleged stolen Google files.

Levandowski and Travis Kalanick, the founder and former CEO of Uber, had allegedly been hanging out and brainstorming ideas for self-driving technology even when Levandowski was still working for Google. Kalanick recently testified in court that he had wanted to hire Levandowski, but Levandowski wanted to break out on his own. Continue reading